Talk:Fishing cat

{{Help-me-helped}}

From various secondary sources, I have found recently that fishing cat is classified as Endangered not vulnerable. Anyone please confirm and change its status. Heba Aisha (talk) 10:04, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

• {{u|Heba Aisha}} the IUCN Red List website still currently says vulnerable [https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/18150/50662615 here] (21 June 2016). If you have any more recent reliable sources I suggest you list them here for people to review. Cheers KylieTastic (talk) 10:19, 15 September 2021 (UTC)
• The IUCN status is Vulnerable, which is one of their three threatened categories, along with Endangered and Critically Endangered. Is it possible that the other sources are using endangered as a general description (=IUCN threatened) rather than referring specifically to the IUCN category? The fishing cat is "endangered" in a general sense, but not "Endangered" according to IUCN criteria (note cases). —  Jts1882 | talk  15:24, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

:Possible is also that these {{tq|various secondary sources}} are websites that have not been updated since 2016. I've seen a blog referring to the outdated status. -- BhagyaMani (talk) 15:34, 15 September 2021 (UTC)

{{Talk:Fishing cat/GA1}}

{{Talk:Fishing cat/GA2}}

{{Talk:Fishing cat/GA3}}

Re: verification of fishing cat as largest Prionailurus. Archive.org is down, but my local copy covers the fishing cat on pages 281-284. It doesn't mention being a second edition. It doesn't explicitly say that the fishing cat is the largest Prionailurus. It says it is larger than P. bengalensis and elsewhere says P. rubiginosus is smaller than P. bengalensis (p276). So Pocock considers it the larger of the three Indian Prionailurus cats.  —  Jts1882 | talk  17:12, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

:That's right : there is no mention of second edition on the title page. – BhagyaMani (talk) 18:34, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

:Re size: Pocock wrote on page 266 under the heading Key to the Three Species Based on External Characters. about viverrinus: {{tq| ... size, the largest of the genus}}. – BhagyaMani (talk) 18:46, 10 October 2024 (UTC)

::{{re|BhagyaMani}} Sounds good to me. As the IA is down, I've taken you at your word that this is said on page 266. (And yes, this is to my understanding the second edition; we have the first on Wikisource, published in the late 1800s). If this turns out to be some sort of misunderstanding once the IA is back up, this would be trivial to correct, but I trust you on this enough to give it a pass in the review. Besides, I think at this point I've made up my mind to give {{u|Grungaloo}} a week to respond given they previously quick-failed a fairly similar version of the article (I think it's sufficiently different), so the IA should be back by then. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 22:49, 11 October 2024 (UTC)

:::What you call the first edition was NOT written by Pocock but by Blanford. So Pocock's book with the same title is indeed his first and only edition. Pocock's volume 2 was published a few years later. BhagyaMani (talk) 04:50, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

::: I can confirm page 266 for the statement {{tq| ... size, the largest of the genus}}.

::: Agree that Blandford's and Pocock's books, despite the similar titles, are separate works rather than different editions of the same work.  —  Jts1882 | talk  16:55, 12 October 2024 (UTC)

::::{{Re|Jts1882}} What does the whole sentence say? Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 11:58, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

::::: It's part of a key:

::::::a. Tail over half the length of the head and body and over twice the length of the hind foot.

::::::::[b and b' distiguishing bengalensis and rubiginosus]

::::::a' Tail less than half the length of the head and body and less than twice the length of the hind foot; size, the largest of the genus ... viverrinus Bennett, p 281.

:::::  —  Jts1882 | talk  12:29, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

::::::Yeah, hopefully it doesn't take too long for the internet archive to be up and running once again. Wolverine XI ^{(talk to me)} 19:21, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

::::::: They are saying [https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:73dpznbu4wqwtcyurwbiulov days rather than longer]. I hadn't realised how often I use that site.  —  Jts1882 | talk  19:48, 13 October 2024 (UTC)

{{Template:Did you know nominations/Fishing cat}}

{{ping|Wolverine XI|BhagyaMani|TheTechnician27}} There are areas in several sections (Behavior, Distribution) that are copyright violations and super close paraphrasing of the source references. These need to be removed or rewritten to clear wp:copyvio rules.--Kevmin § 16:52, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

:{{Re|Kevmin}} I trust you on this, so I'm curious: which parts did I miss? Within 'Behaviour and ecology', the only problematic excerpt I noticed per the GA review is one which I already cut down to 'can swim long distances, even underwater'. This is the same string of six words as in the book, but in its current state, I see it entirely as stating a fact from the work cited in the only natural way to express it rather than copyvio; for example, I wouldn't change "it is thought to be primarily nocturnal" to "it is believed that it is predominantly active at night" just to not have a five-word substring that matches the source. I realize now that I overlooked the sentence preceding citation [15] in 'Distribution and habitat', however, as that is unambiguously close paraphrasing. I'll fix that one right away. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 17:16, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

::That is one, and it could easily be reworded along the lines of "Fishing cats are noted to be long distance swimmers and have been documented to do so underwater". More problematic is the opening sentence of "Distribution and habitat" is pulled almost verbatum from Ref15 [http://carnivoractionplans1.free.fr/wildcats.pdf Ref 15 page 74]. Our article "It predominantly inhabits wetlands, including swamps, marshes, oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks and mangrove forests, but it is generally absent from fast-flowing water channels", the source "Fishing cats are strongly associated with wetlands. They are typically found in swamps and marshy areas, oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks, and ". This is the same sentence per Copyvio, and needs reworking, plus the hook used for the DYK nom is a copyvio of the opening for the source.--Kevmin § 17:37, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

:::{{re|Kevmin}} This is the one I already fixed, but I don't understand what else is supposed to be done with that sentence; the source gives a comma-separated list of six areas where the fishing cat is commonly found, and we give the same six-area, comma-separated list. For example, if I wrote a book stating that "the US states comprising the Pacific Northwest are Washington, Oregon, and Idaho", I couldn't foreseeably treat it as copyvio if someone said "in the US, the Pacific Northwest includes Washington, Oregon, and Idaho". Specifically, we say: "It predominantly inhabits wetlands around slow-moving bodies of water, including swamps, marshes, oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks, and mangrove forests." The IUCN says: "Fishing cats are strongly associated with wetlands. They are typically found in swamps and marshy areas, oxbow lakes, reed beds, tidal creeks, and mangrove areas." (I did go ahead and change the "even underwater" line to "It is known to be a proficient long-distance and underwater swimmer" not because I thought it was copyvio but moreso because I thought the cadence was bad.) This once again isn't to fix a perceived copyvio issue but moreso for the quality of the article: I will write "It predominantly inhabits densely vegetated wetlands around slow-moving bodies of water, including..." simply because Wild Cats of the World and the IUCN source both agree that dense vegetation is a major component of the cat's habitat. The six-item list, however, I still don't see as problematic; it's just fundamental information about the cat's habitat. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 21:26, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

::::{{re|TheTechnician27}} We can beak it into two sentences that group the types of habitats. {{tq|They are typically found in freshwater areas like marshes, oxbow lakes and swamps. They also are associated with brackish water environments such as mangrove forests, reed beds, and tidal creeks.}} --Kevmin § 22:37, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

:::::{{re|Kevmin}} I'm definitely onboard with something like that which gives additional context to readers. The only nagging points I see for this specific proposal are how we would demarcate fresh-, brackish-, and saltwater. Reed beds are, to my understanding, predominantly freshwater but can be brackish, unless they're mostly brackish specifically in Southeast Asia. I think oxbow lakes are [https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2667010023000823 cut-and-dry] freshwater. Swamps and marshes can, I'm pretty sure, just be all three. I think tidal creeks vary between brackish and salt, and I think it's similar with mangroves. With that ambiguity introduced, neither the WCoW or IUCN sources mention the salinity of those habitats, so it seems to be WP:SYNTH barring another source. Edit: Oh, wait, I think I can do something here. Edit 2: Done. TheTechnician27 (Talk page) 22:54, 23 October 2024 (UTC)

::::::{{re|TheTechnician27}} That looks great, reed beds are low and high salinity depending on specifics of geography, (Great Salt Lake has native and invasive reed beds). I placed tidal creeks in the brackish grouping specifically due to having higher salt concentration then freshwaters. As the opening at Mangrove notes, {{tq|A mangrove is a shrub or tree that grows mainly in coastal saline or brackish water. Mangroves grow in an equatorial climate, typically along coastlines and tidal rivers. They have particular adaptations to take in extra oxygen and remove salt, allowing them to tolerate conditions that kill most plants}}. There are some freshwater species, but they are the exception. I think we can clarify this even more by taking sentence one and adding the distinctions between the two (trees vers herbaceous cover) eg: {{tq|It predominantly inhabits densely vegetated wetlands around slow-moving bodies of water like tree dominated swamps and herbaceous plant dominated marshes.}} Then we can massage the wording of setence 2 as such {{tq|Habitats include low-salinity bodies such as oxbow lakes through reed beds into high-salinity ones such as tidal creeks and mangrove forests.}}.--Kevmin § 23:45, 23 October 2024 (UTC)